James T. Edmondson Type Tester
James T. Edmondson and I collaborated on a site where you can try out his fonts.
I’m delighted to have made this site.
Making is important to me. It’s how I’d like to measure personal well-being. If I’m making things, then I’m happy. For the past couple years, I’ve been managing success and popularity of Isotope and Masonry. This is a good problem. But it results in me spending a good deal of time not making things. Just closing issues and replying to emails.
When James approached me with this opportunity, I decided to give it top priority in my sitting-in-front-of-a-screen time. Support issues and response emails would be neglected for a bit. I’m happy I did, because I get to walk away with a project completed.
For those of you interested in the codey bits, the project is up on GitHub: github.com/desandro/jtetypes (the webfonts are not in the repo, as to protect James’ intellectual property).
The site is built with the Node command line tool grunt. Grunt is well-suited to generate small sites like this one. As it’s in JavaScript, it allows to me to use the same data for both templating and in the live scripts (see site-data.js).
Other development resources include Google Web Font Loader, jQuery BBQ for dynamic hash URLs, and a hack for vertically centered textarea.
This project held an interesting challenge as I had to hand the site back over to James for final implementation. I ended up writing a step-by-step README on how to generate the site, going so far as to explain how to install the OS X Command Line Tools. James was able to get it done, but it’s clear that this process isn’t tenable unless you’re a developer. Ideally, I’d like to provide some sort of interface, with a big button “GENERATE SITE”, and not have to worry about opening up Terminal at all.
For another project, I suppose.